


starsung

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Series: original works, collected [2]
Category: Marvel (Comics), Original Work, The Chronicle of the Wolf Queen, The Illyrian Codices
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Constructed Languages, Dimension Travel, F/M, Fantasy, Gen, Jewish Character, Magic, Original Fiction, Other, Science Fiction, Transformation, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-05 00:07:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16356833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: April never liked the idea of being made of starstuff-- she’s more at home with the iron in her blood. Sure, that technically came from the stars, but that's more degrees of separation than bare counting. The iron she can smell when the skin on the soles of her feet split while she’s dancing, the iron she can taste when she bites at the dead skin on her lips before an audition and pulls off too much, that's more related to the Earth than the stars.But when the stars start talking to her and she has to reconsider her views on starstuff.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little AU for The Illyrian Codices wherein April Miller finds herself thrust into the shoes of The Wolf Queen. [Read the Codices here](https://theillyriancodices.wordpress.com/).

It's the queerest thing, walking alone at night and hearing the constellations sing. Not the bears and serpent and warriors, no, those aren't the stars she sees when she looks up at the city sky. When she looks up there are as many stars as there are grains of salt in a salt shaker and half of them are tinged with green from a second moon-- the third is a pale yellow-- there is no way in hell that's an effect of light pollution.

 _Oh my G-d,_ she thinks, _I’m going insane._

There's nothing else left to explain this. She throws out all the bread in the house while her sisters look at her like she's grown a third head because she’s convinced that maybe this is all a mold-induced hallucination. She stops eating wheat and red meat. There's nothing for it, though. It doesn't stop. The one sure thing is that she's too far in the middle of the city to hear them right. The longer she goes trying to get through school and ballet and the synagogue, the surer of that she is. She needs to leave. To go far away and then farther beyond that still. Then, when she is beyond everything she has ever known, at least a mile past human, she might find out what the stars are trying to say.

* * *

She trips during rehearsal and it takes her several minutes to bounce back.

“You alright, April?”

“Yeah, I just haven’t been sleeping too well.”

Weeks go by of her "not sleeping too well".

She fakes sick during a field trip to the fossil quarry. The closer to the city she stays the clearer she can think. The stars are closing in and she can feel them bearing down louder and louder. She can see the green moon during the day, out of the corner of her eye at the vault of the sky and can’t abide it's watching her. At least the skyscrapers shield her from it sometimes.

This does not stop her from staring at the stars at night (she's started falling asleep in class) until her eyes ache and her alarm clock wakes her up. They're getting closer. Her headphones don't block out the sound.

Somewhere between white noise underscored by thin wavering and the humming of more voices than can be counted she manages to go through her daily life. The sound buzzes behind April's ears night and day. If she's not careful, if she isn't paying enough attention to it and tries to ignore it, it makes her eyes water. It's a sound that wants to be heard. A din that might, to an ear that grew up knowing it, be music.

Six weeks into the slow unwinding of her sanity she wakes up to the music of the stars and her period. An irregular, ungrateful thing that has no respect for her schedule. More bitter cramps than blood.

She sits in the window seat of her bedroom, nauseous, and watches the sun come up-- now, with the three moons, there are two suns to rise in the morning sky. One in the east and another, smaller, bluer in the southeast. She wonders, as they creep over the horizon, if they'll ever align. If such a thing would spell the doom of the world or the doom of whatever world it is she's spinning for herself in response to overwork or repressed trauma or whatever it would be that a psychologist would tell her is happening if she would tell them about the stars.

Her sister knocking on her door jerks her out of her reverie. Eugenia's sharp, "You gonna turn off your damn alarm?" sets April back into her routine.

The clock on her bedside table, a wooden cube with a red LED display for the time, is flashing 6:39. Her alarm has been going off for the last 19 minutes straight. "Sure thing-- sorry about that."

"Whatever, airhead. Some of us like to sleep in yanno."

She sighs and unfolds herself from the window seat just in time for her belly and back to twinge in unison before settling into a bone-deep ache that promises to stay with her all day through classes and rehearsal. 

* * *

 The day the wolf appears she's inches away from throwing her hands up and giving up entirely. From finding herself a refrigerator box to live in and a tin cup to shake at passers-by while rambling about the incessant music of the spheres.

Exhaustion has become her shadow. She wants to hide from the unintelligible voices and the queer starlight. She’s done.

She's come fresh from ballet rehearsal and she aches everywhere. They were practicing throwing today and she's the smallest, therefore, the prime candidate for being chucked through the air and caught like a very graceful sack of potatoes.

Between a speed limit sign and an exit she never takes it appears in the passenger seat of her red hand-me-down Chevrolet. It knows it has every right to be there. An honest-to-goodness wolf not 18 inches from her right side.

She nearly rear-ends a police cruiser and it's only through the application of hysterical tears and frantic Yiddish that keeps her out of a ticket. It isn’t like she has to fake the panic. There is a wolf the color of the void of space in her passenger seat that the officer cannot see. That little treat is for April’s eyes only.

The officer makes pitying noises and gives her a warning. She pulls onto the Jersey turnpike and drives until it’s full dark, until her gas light goes on and she has to pull into a station. Her hands shake while she pumps gas.

The wolf sits silently in the passenger seat and watches her tremble.

* * *

 

She's losing sleep and that must be why her hair's getting lighter and her eyes are turning yellow from green. It isn’t summer, but she’s certain her skin is drinking up the sun and going darker than even her father’s olive complexion. WebMD tells her that she’s probably dying from something horrific that has thirteen syllables. It suggests that she eat healthier-- a laughable piece of advice for a ballerina.

No one questions the changes to her diet because she's a dancer. Small blessings. She doesn't tell anyone that she's stopped eating meat because any meat at all feels like an abomination, a sin, a consumption of power reserved only for ritual. She certainly does not tell them that the meat she’s begun to associate with religion is not from any animal.

She dreams of sucking the marrow out of a dead woman’s femur. Of blood matting her hair and a fresh-peeled skull cracking against a marble step as she strikes it again and again to crack it open for the congealing brain meat inside.

* * *

The wolf skirts around the corners of her vision, at her hip, just around the corners ahead of her-- whatever it wants, really. She knows with an alien sureness that it is checking for something. Maybe it’s looking for danger. For a few days she thinks she can ignore it. Just accept its presence beside her.

It's a guardian, she thinks. Perhaps the strangest one that has ever been bestowed upon a person, but G-d has done stranger things-- who am I to question it?

She’s praying on the Sabbath but thinking of the stars when a woman says to her, with warm, iron-scented breath beside her ear, Why do you look to the stars if I’m right here?

April’s whole body breaks out in goosebumps and she forces herself to open her eyes. The wolf is sitting beside her, black as the void and filled with foreign stars. Then the floor drops out underneath her knees and she can’t breathe.

* * *

 When she was seven, daddy took her to Virginia Beach and she got pulled under the waves and it took everyone too long to figure out she'd been caught in a riptide. She never told anyone that between the terror and the suffocating, choking, wet, salt, wet, strangulation of it, that it's the safest she's ever felt in her entire life.

She’s only taken showers since then.

* * *

 The next time she blinks she’s sitting in a chair and looking out a window on a rainy day.

She gasps because she’s gone from void to ground so suddenly—the last thing she remembers is the synagogue. This window is not hers. Hers has a window seat with a cushion that’s upholstered with yellow floral fabric from the 70’s. Her mother hates it.

A man comes to squat in front of where she’s sitting. He’s in blue scrubs that match his eyes. He’s talking, she knows because she can hear the calm in his voice, but he sounds like he’s talking from the back of an auditorium and it’s hard to make out his words.

“April, I need you to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.”

She tries to do what he asks as best she can, each breath stinging down her windpipe. Eventually, she must be doing alright, because the man in scrubs seems satisfied. He asks her, “Do you know where you are?”

She’s crying when she shakes her head and she guesses anyway, “The hospital?” She’s still shaking, but all over, not just her inside head like she has been since December. “Who are you? Where—where’s my daddy?”

“This is Spring Harbor, April, and I’m Jim. I’m a nurse,” he tells her, so calm. He knows what he’s doing. “I think your dad’s at work, but someone’s calling him right now. Do you know what day it is?”

That’s the sort of question people ask when they don’t think you’re going to get it right. She wipes at her face and tries to look composed. She isn’t going to get it wrong, then. April doesn’t get things wrong-- that’s why she has a 4.5 GPA. “Monday? March twelfth?”

“It’s actually Tuesday the twentieth. You’ve been here for eight days.” At least he looks sympathetic.

She blinks at him. Spring Harbor. She knows the name—it’s the funny farm up in Westbrook. That does explain why she’s in her favorite set of sweats, but not her favorite pair of Chucks. They don’t let people keep shoes with laces in places like this. She swallows, looks up at Jim the nurse. “When’s my dad gonna be here? I wanna go home.”

Jim explains that they're going to have her talk to a doctor first before she can go home. “You’ve been catatonic for over a week-- you’ve been awake, but haven’t responded to any stimulus,” he explains, because he doesn’t know that she’s read a lot out of the DSM this semester and she knows what “catatonic” means. “None of your doctors could find an explanation for it.”

The wolf is laying underneath the rec room chair Jim’s sitting in. Where its tail lays over his shoe there’s a hole in the world. She stares at it.

“So you want me to talk to another doctor who can’t explain what’s going on?”

“Usually, in situations like yours, psychiatrists are better help than neurologists.”

April’s stomach turns. She agrees to talk to the psychiatrist anyway.

The doctor's a nice lady named Selena who asks questions that are straightforward without being rude and looks like she wouldn't judge even if April was a complete nut. It’s her sweater that completes it-- a sensible, taupe turtleneck that looks very well made. Selena sits across from her the whole time, paying attention while she talks about dance and her sisters, gives a basic overview of her privileged childhood up until passing out on March 11th.

The couch is soft enough it might swallow her up. April kind of wishes it would.

There’s a lull where April runs out of words and once it has stretched on beyond bearing, Selena says, “Would you tell me more about what happened before you passed out on the 11th?” Selena doesn't even pretend to be like the therapists in the movies who are all advice and note-taking-- she just listens and asks more questions like she wants to understand.

Maybe that's why it feels safe to tell her about the stars-- “They started singing just after winter break. Then they changed. I noticed that Ursa Major was gone first.”-- the three moons, and the talking wolf. “It’s sitting beside your chair,” April tells the truth quietly, because maybe, just maybe Selena won’t hear it, “and it’s made of nothing at all but there are stars on its tongue.”

The wolf’s tongue lolls out of its mouth over silver teeth. It looks tired.

April doesn't get to go home.

She doesn’t get to stay in Spring Harbor either. The wolf is having none of that.

* * *

  _The_ girlqueen _is waifish and too tired to be bothered for much longer. Patience has its place and this is not it. There is only so long one can stay_ eyewise _in another world before one forgets the path home again, and the hours Sariah has spent here ache like years. Even her brother, far behind where he is playing gatekeeper, is growing tired._

 _Sariah gathers herself into the_ wolfbody _that she was assured would be familiar. If it were familiar she would not be so afraid, she thinks, annoyed._

 _It’s an easy thing to slip weightlessly on top of the bed and breathe into the girl’s face, cool enough to wake her up. Before the_ girlqueen _can startle, Sariah tells her mind, Quiet. I’m bringing you_ home, _and gets her jaws into the_ girlqueen’s _clothes to drag her from bed and back to shore._

* * *

 April Miller is reported as a missing person at 6 a.m. on March 21st, 2012.


	2. Chapter 2

April wakes up on a beach with a sky overhead a deep gradient of greens. The sand is warm under her back and the ocean roars at her feet.

The chattering around her doesn’t help. Even when she closes her eyes, the ground spins underneath her, and the cacophony of voices goes on. Somewhere to her right there are the sounds of someone retching. Someone else, feminine, making soothing noises.

To her left, women are arguing. The singing is all around her and the melody is one she recognizes, at least, but none of the words. The language isn’t one she’s familiar with. It’s a chilling realization. She’s traveled the world with her family. There’s no reason she should have been kidnapped by people from so far away that she could not recognize their language.

Something hard jabs into her side.

And again when she doesn’t acknowledge it-- it will probably bruise.

She opens her eyes. The sky above is still tinged green, three moons high above, the two smallest ones full and bright. The third peeks shyly from the darkness. Much closer to the ground an antlered old woman stands over her.

No, she doesn’t have antlers, but she’s wearing them, and the black she’s cloaked in makes it difficult to tell whether the bones are part of her or not.

April takes a deep breath—the water is so thick and cool in the air it’s almost like Virginia Beach but so much kinder—and asks, “Where am I?”

The woman says something and April can feel her voice vibrating in her bones. Then she jabs April again with the butt of her staff. April bats it away and pushes herself upright, “I can’t understand you! Where am I?”

The annoyance does not require a common language to convey. Quick as a flash, the woman reaches out and claps her hand over April’s mouth and says something again. April almost pushes her away but there’s a stretching pain in her throat like she tried to swallow a cueball. She can’t breathe. It’s an awful thing, her blood pounding in her ears and her hands coming up to her neck to try to do something to make it stop as something tears open—and then it ends on its own. No pain. As if it hadn’t been there to begin with. Her mouth and throat are her own again.

The old woman has her eyes trained on April as she takes her hand away, her staff poised to strike at any moment. “Are you feeling less dense now?”

“Excuse me?”

That is, apparently, a good enough answer. She replies, “I am Huragan—you, _dzecię_ , will call me “czczony”.”

She repeats the word back, no less confused, carefully wrapping her mouth around the syllables, “Yes, alright,  Chugh-ch-own-eh.” It’s a little jerky, but she thinks that with practice it will come sooner. She pretends not to notice the way her voice resonates throughout her chest cavity and her skull, the way it sounds like more than one person speaking. There’s already enough of a cacophony around her, enough weird shit going on. This doesn't warrant inspection.

Huragan seems satisfied with this, too, and turns to see to the other people on the beach. April can’t help but be a little grateful not to be under such intense scrutiny. It gives her a moment to breathe through the shock and awe. To look for a foothold in reality.

The greenish light of the moons is as bright as daytime back home (she does not question why there are three moons-- that’s too much for now). The beach is barren of scrub grasses and every few dozen yards there are black patches in the sand that don’t reflect the moonlight. The treeline is farther back than any beach she’s ever been on but the trees are thick in a way that reminds her of Aunt Marie’s place in the Everglades: too dense for light to penetrate the canopy, the perimeter strung with mosses and vines like caution tape.

* * *

There is no occasion for sleep-- she’d arrived near this alien world's sunrise. Or suns' rise, considering that there are two of them-- and so she spends her time in the company of Huragan swallowing down panic.

The old woman is taller than April, even without the antler headdress. That’s not too surprising. Until the last few months, her pet argument with her sister Cory had been that eventually she would get her last growth spurt and be tall enough to buy jeans that weren’t made for preteens. Every one of the dozen-some women present is easily over a foot taller than her and all of them pale haired, dark skinned, and armed to the teeth. But for the armaments and the height, they could be distant cousins of hers.

If this ethereal beach is strange, the women here—and all but one of the people she has encountered here at least looks like what she would call a woman—are stranger still. Each of them is copper and gold made flesh, young and unlined but for the very oldest of them: Huragan and the other elders, called jezda. Their skin is full of fissures and scars in patterns both natural and designed. They cast her glances when they think she isn’t looking, their elliptical pupils too round for the intense morning light, scrutinizing her. They see too much. They expect something of her and she suspects she will disappoint them.

“We are called Ichlowandian,” Huragan tells her after hours of silence like she’s picking up the thread of conversation. “You are Ichlowandian. We are from the Isles of Ichlowand. This place is one of the kinder parts of the wastes. Had you been born properly, you would have been raised here.”

“I was born just fine.”

“Don't raise your hackles at me. You were meant to be birthed and raised here, beside this ocean, to the usurper who calls herself queen. Instead, you have grown too many worlds away.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Hardly.”

“Fine, then I’m delusional.”

“You are _Fah’ti_ of Ichlowand.”

“Only delusional people tell themselves stuff like that. I’m not the _queen_ of anything. I’m going to graduate high school and go to AMDA and after that maybe find some nice Jewish boy to marry—I’m not a queen.”

Huragan does not see fit to dignify her argument with a response. She gets slowly to her feet, joints popping loud enough to make April wince, then shuffles off in the direction of the treeline.

One of the Ichlowandian women finally does more than stare at April from a distance. She squats down beside her and asks, “What’s Jewish?” Her teeth are filed. Her armor is black as pitch but she doesn’t seem to be affected by the heat.

April, grasping wildly in her head for something normal, pretends she’s talking to someone at a carnival. She explains, about G-d and Canaan and the Law. The woman listens, dutifully, for as long as April speaks, nodding occasionally. Yet April feels that she does not understand. How can someone understand if they don’t ask questions?

April can feel in the soles of her feet that these people believe in vastly different things than she.

They eat, eventually. Dried, sweet fruits that are somehow sharp on her tongue and entirely unfamiliar. They make for a satisfying meal though and this, for some absurd reason, assures her that she is awake. She is awake and she ought to get used to the unfamiliar.

* * *

The Ichlo take her into the swamps and she knows she should be afraid—of the land, of the people and the way they speak and move. They are strong enough to break her bones without trying and they move like the lionesses she’s seen in documentaries. She should be afraid of the acid bubbling up through the mud and murk, creating miniature currents of flesh-scalding water.

There’s a sweetness underneath the acrid stench. It burns but not in a way that smacks of danger. She wants to wade into the black water and swim. She should be afraid but she isn’t and there must be something wrong with that.

"If you were wrong, then the air here would melt the lungs in your ribs," Huragan tells her over the sounds of the swamp birds and insects. April startles in such a way that it makes the old woman huff out a creaking laugh. She says, “But that is not what you are here for. We left you away for too long—there is much that you must be taught to make up for that mistake.”

They want to see what she knows. “What those strangers taught you,” they say as if her parents, her sisters, were caretakers, were not her family. The idea chafes. They repeat it over and over, “the outlanders”, “those people”, until she feels raw trying to remind them that it is her family they are speaking of. That they love her, and she them, that they are waiting for her to come back home.

She misses Maine and the comfort of the cool spring that was coming.

But even with this, she does not want to go home.

* * *

For days the Ichlo women test her. For days they are disappointed.

She can dance, so she is quick on her feet and quick to learn. She can fence, too, and decently well considering that she was never anywhere near as good as her sister Jezebel. Holding a pair of heavy wooden sticks to learn their fighting technique isn’t challenging, per se, but she lacks the years of strength that come from the warlike lives of these strange sea women. Their instinct for bringing an opponent to their knees.

They check their blows against her like they know she is easier to break than they are.

At home, worlds away, she’d had her bone density tested-- because of the dancing, because of the dieting-- and so she knows there is no way she can withstand the shattering blows these warriors give each other and shrug off while they train and it’s obvious that they resent how gentle they must be with her. It stings something deeper than her pride.

Every day they test and train. Every day April fails. Every day she returns to the tasks set before her resolved to at least fail one more time before calling it a day.

* * *

There are two people who are not Ichlowandian: a boy and girl around her age. They look enough alike that they might be twins. They’re certainly siblings. None of the Ichlo women speak to or of them much and April has to draw her own conclusions.

She can’t seem to draw any, though not for lack of trying. The twins are all but silent when they aren’t speaking to each other in a language that Huragan has not given her the ability to understand. They are both tall, lean, and sunburnt a painful viridian under their plain robes.

They might be religious figures of some sort. Their tattoos—the ones April can see— match. Both of them have careful rows of dots along their right cheekbone, whorls on their palms, three thick bands around the left bicep, more heavy lines that look like they cross over the left collarbone— all of them in blue-black ink that shines silver in the sun. None of them are symbols she can recognize.

One of the twins, the girl, watches the Ichlo train her. April does not appreciate the audience to her perpetual embarrassment. Especially not when she murmurs to her brother, “This is their warrior Queen? Our dydaktya will be more formidable on her deathbed.”

“It isn’t fair to compare a _sudranov_ to one of our own,” the boy replies in that same undertone, his white-blue eyes fixed on April. “Look at her tutors. They would skin us like sheep if given cause yet they had to start somewhere, too.”

April has no idea what a dydaktya is, but she knows an insult when she hears one and she’s seized, finally, by the irresistible need to run away and hide. There is nowhere she can go, no privacy, not even boulders to hide behind. She walks away anyhow, head as high as she can manage. She follows the gut pull of something deeper into the toxic jungle until she can no longer hear the Ichlo calling after her.

She walks until the only light she can see comes from the veins of the plants; until her bare feet ache and sting from the earth clinging to them; until her limbs are tender with exhaustion. She stops then and curls into the embrace of a tree and lets her feet sink into the quietly roiling water and mud at the base. Puts down roots like any other uprooted plant, and hopes the shock of being transplanted doesn’t kill her.

This is where the wolves find her.

Neither is like the wolf that spirited her away from home. There are no galaxies in their fur or stars caught between their teeth. They reflect nothing, their silhouettes suggested by the light around the gaping darkness of their bodies. Only their eyes are bright, luminescent like grandmother’s real silver tea set.

It’s absurd to think of her grandmother’s tea set at a time like this. She lets out half of a hysterical laugh as the wolves approach.

They are twins, like the not-Ichlo, only these wolves are decidedly here for her. She knows this.

And she knows they could devour her whole, but instead the larger of the pair pushes his snout and head against her side, whining low and pressing into her with incredible gentleness. The other—his sister, she thinks, with knowledge more certain than her own name—seems to nod in approval before she stalks further into the swamp. She walks on the water, her paws barely disturbing it. Time stops having meaning while April watches the water ripple in the she-wolf’s wake—and then the she-wolf is back in front of her again, a white serpent cradled carefully in her jaws.

The big wolf is half on top of her and April stills beneath the weight of him.

_I am Bezład, my little Heart,_ the wolf murmurs, pressing his head against her stomach. Then Mir (this name, too, is the same sudden and right Knowing) drops the serpent onto April's shoulder. It’s cool in a way that nothing from the zoo’s reptile house ever was and slick. It burns where it touches her skin and it coils its body snug around her throat.

_Now they will not question you_ , Mir tells her triumphantly and watches April gasp and claw at her skin as the poison in the creature's scales brands their pattern into her neck.

_Careful my little Heart,_ Mir advises, steady, while tears are springing into April's eyes, _Wyrmlings are a gift and this one has waited a very long time to grace your throat. Endure it._

Bezład huffs a noise and noses into April's side again. _Let her sleep, sister. When she wakes all will be better. Huragan ought to have sent us instead of that unwarm-fleshed creature._ Bezład does not like either of the foreign twins who brough Fah'ti home to them.

They are outlanders. It’s the principle of the thing.

Mir huffs and pads over to the hollow and drowsily drapes her body across the other two and presses her great head against April's shoulder. It’s a tight fit, all of them snuggled up against the hollow of the tree, but April isn’t bothered by the bark biting her back. Her wolves—they are hers—are with her, and here they will stay. That thought overshadows all the small aches in her body.

* * *

Leontes is elected to seek out the Ichlo girlqueen without much ceremony.

One of the warriors points to where he is sitting and trying to weave a basket while he eavesdrops. He has nothing else to do.

“Send that boywitch,” she says it in the trade tongue, because she doesn’t care if he hears that particular insult. It should irk him, the hypocrisy inherent in her statement— he should point out how they revere their own witches who, for all their power, were not capable of doing what he and his sister did. Of opening a hole in two worlds and drawing them close enough to bring a person through.

He stays silent.

The Ichlo speak about the girl from the other world in disapproving tones; they are fond of their gossip. They say, “Our children are brought up to be warriors as dangerous and deadly as the Sea herself, as if she could be that, growing so far from the Mother?”. This girl is quiet in a way that defies their expectations-- and not to a good end. They say, ”She hides around Huragan like a whelp. Like a boychild, too afraid to fight."

Leontes thinks there is work to be done and gossiping over it will do them no good when war finds them again. He keeps his own mouth shut. The basket he’s weaving from the small sharp grasses found on the beach will be water-tight and small enough to hang from a belt. A useful thing. A better use of his time than idle chatter.

A warrior—he thinks she’s called Chora— points to him and says, "It’s a good idea; make yourself useful, outlander."

"His sister is stronger," another argues, "he didn't close the gate so much as he fainted when they came back into the world and it collapsed onto itself. The swamp will eat him.”

“If it does, no one will miss him. It'll be good for him, then, a test to prove his worth."

The twins stand in unison. Leontes shoves the half-woven basked at Sariah hopes that will put a stop to any ideas she might have; her shoulders are tense. She wants to argue with the Ichlo and with her lash of a tongue it would do them good, but they will fail their own growing if they get killed in a petty scuffle over name calling.

“I’ll be back to finish that,” he tells her in their mothertongue, voice low, pointing to the basket. “Don’t let it get broken.” His meaning is plain.

He walks carefully through the swamp, the brackish water freezing under his feet. He doesn't want to wade through it. Something tells him he might not keep all of his limbs if he does, either because of the creatures in the mud or the hunger of the water itself. Still, the ice he makes doesn't form like it should, too soft and slick. Some property of the swamp keeping it burning at his feet despite the calluses his barefooted childhood has built.

In truth, he doesn't mind having been sent after the girlqueen. He's tasted her world when wandering the Veil before and his curiosity about it is insatiable. Maybe she will speak of it.

The night is heavy and hot even in the light robes the Ichlo have lent him. He and Sariah had come down the coast in the clothes of the north— heavy tunics and wool pants, cut to allow for layers that they did not need but wore nevertheless. Their Mrozic blood ran cold and no cold had ever done them harm.

Huragan had graciously provided them with clothing befitting the weather of the southern seas. It was lighter than linen, leaving their arms bare and shifting in the slightest breeze, still in the blue-black that marked them as dydaktya. The dark fabric sticks to his back with sweat and the water in the air. There isn't a cool breeze he could summon for hundreds of miles, not even a hint of one.

The heat is trapped in his very bones.

If it weren't for the moonlight he wouldn't be able to distinguish this heat from daytime. Not that the swamp is altogether dark. The glow of the plants is so strong that he has to look up at the canopy and remind himself that it is night.

There is power in the air and he follows the bitter taste of it westward. Either it will take him to the girl or something that will try to eat him. Both would be interesting diversions from the impatient suffering of humid heat.

He almost stumbles into the veilbeast -- which is how he knows it wasn't stalking him but on business of its own. He comes to a stop as the wolf growls, disturbing the soft ground in waves, and sending birds to flight.

He stumbles not to speak his mothertongue and failing, honorifics and apologies spilling from his lips. “ _Niferkal draje mratora._ I’m only running an errand, _graj wulskan. Skovetkal da dharkon’ama_?"

The wolf speaks in the Ichlo tongue of too many voices, making his eyes water; but whatever it says must be approval because when it stands aside (less like moving more melting into incorporeality beneath the skin of the world) there the girl is with another wolf beside her and a serpent lounging across her shoulders. Where the serpent has lain and shifted her skin is blistered and raw-- an unreal, un-illyrian pinkish red-- if it weren't for the wolves guarding her Leontes would think the reptile was a threat. As it is she’s staring at him from where she leans against her wolf’s side, content.

Both wolves are twice his size; he is not used to feeling small.

When he recalls the trade tongue, he says to her, "It's good to find you well, _dharkona mir._ Did you plan to return to camp in the near future?"

"You aren't Ichlowandian." It’s half of an accusation and Leontes has no idea what to make of it.

"... Very perceptive," he replies, the teasing in his voice gentle. The trade tongue settles into his mouth with carefully-measured consonants and soft vowels. "My home is in the north. Farther than any people on the continent dare go, and I would wager farther than the Ichlo have gone, for centuries. Some seasons we go farther. Most of the year it's such that non-Mroz will blacken from the cold."

She continues to stare. The glow of swamp plants makes her hair look white, lends a greenish cast to her tawny skin. All at once, to him, the girlqueen looks much more than illyrian. Perhaps the Ichlo are underestimating her after all.

He goes on, at a loss for anything else to do but keep talking; this is the most he’s had an opportunity to speak to someone other than his sister in months. He doesn't want to squander it. "Life north of the forests and fields is not the fearsome thing southerners think it is. We must still eat, love, sleep, quarrel. The only difference is that we need to do all of these things with far less clothing and without fewer murderous foreigners." But we are a somewhat bitter people, he doesn’t say, being hunted like vermin until they fled for the uninhibited wastes in the north made us so.

"Your people are murdered?"

"From the forests down they think we're demons."

"Why?"

"Because we were made by death.” He pauses for the span of a heartbeat then asks, unsubtle in his change of subject, “Will you come back with me?"

"I - Yeah. Yes. I'll come back. But I'm bringing my wolves."

April can’t shake the thought that the boy walks on water-- On ice. That magically generates under his feet, but that’s all semantics-- he’s still walking on water.

April pinches herself as she gets to her feet. Stepping back into the mire gives her pause. These were her favorite sweatpants-- they say “fight me” in pink down the left leg-- but they’re a lost cause now. She should be more worried about her bare feet. When she was 13 they’d visited her mother’s family in Florida. She met her cousin David who’d lost a toe to a snapping turtle in a swamp like this.

Only there isn’t a swamp like this one on Earth, of that she’s certain.

_Dancers’ feet aren’t supposed to be pretty anyway,_ she thinks, and giggles to herself. This is all it takes to startle the boy from where he’s stepping on the balls of his feet on ice-- _magical ice_ \-- and he pitches forward into the wet ground with a yelp.

April gasps. The wolves go still. When nothing leaps out from the dim to eat them, April doubles over laughing. The boy kneels up, shaking mud off his hands. More of it streaks his face, is caked on the front of his body. The soft, sound he’s making is his own laughter. “I should pay better attention, shouldn’t I?”

It’s too much a burden to reply. A magical boy is staring up at her from where he’s sitting on his knees in a hungry swamp on what April is increasingly certain is a different planet from her own, possibly another time, too. It’s too much. There are tears in her eyes and her chest is tight. She should be laughing, but she can’t breathe to get sound out. She wants to straighten up, to get back to walking like she’s supposed to, so she can make the Ichlo regret looking at her like she was some crustacean crawled up out of the sand. Instead, her breath makes a desperate, rattling noise in her throat. Where her chest should be expanding with breath there’s only crushing weight.

“ _Kholsi_ ,” he says, somewhere far away.

Bezład growls.

April doesn’t need to understand either to know they’re swearing. Both in entirely different languages whose meanings still settle into her teeth with clarity. She wants to apologize. More than that, she wants to breathe.

Mir presses against April’s side, making her sit down before she falls down.

April sinks her hands into the wolf's fur. It feels like nothing and she recoils, makes it halfway back to her feet before she stumbles right into the boy. He doesn’t fall this time. He doesn’t pull her to him, just lets her brace her hands on his forearms, gripping hers right back, and leans with her while she tries to stay standing on watery knees. He murmurs, “Hush, _nanćkal, dharkona._ Breathe; it’s only fear.”

She wants to tell him that’s the problem, that she _can’t breathe_ because she's terrified of her current reality. That he’s saying stupid things that don’t translate at all. But her body responds to the distraction. The sticky air hits the back of her throat in what feels like the first time in hours, though she’s distantly aware that it’s been a few minutes at most.

“Don’t go,” he says.

April draws as deep a breath as she can-- it shudders into her chest and wheezes back out before it can get any lower than her collarbones. She does it again, deeper this time, and again until she can feel the middle of her back broadening with each breath. Sweat drips down into her eye, down her neck. She’s dug her nails so hard into the boy’s arms he’s bleeding-- he sucks in a breath when she pulls her nails out of his skin, but doesn’t complain. She stays holding onto his forearms for a moment, though.

Panting, she looks up at him, demands, “ What was that? “Don’t go”? Where the hell would I go?”

He shrugs off her outrage. “Wherever fear wanted to lead you. Some wights are good to chase, but not Fear. It makes things worse.”

April frowns harder. Her head aches behind her cheekbones and eyes. Her breathing is the loudest thing she’s ever heard. “This place is fucking weird,” she accuses, her voice hoarse, “and so are you.” She lets go of him. She flexes her fingers. She can smell his blood under her nails and it makes her stomach growl. That’s a reaction she isn’t going to think about.

The wolves bracket them, waiting. The serpent around April’s neck shifts, reminding her that it’s there in loose coils. She rubs her hands over her face. “Well, this hike isn’t getting any shorter is it? Let’s go.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Remember: your comments give us life!! [I'm never going to stop pimping out the Codices, y'all. Go check 'em out and I might just shut up about it for a while.](https://theillyriancodices.wordpress.com/)


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